Reader question:

Please explain “side effect of Trumpism”, as in: A side effect of Trumpism is that fewer people are coming to the United States as tourists.

My comments:

First of all, Trumpism refers to the ideology of Donald Trump, President of the United States, “ism” being a philosophy or a system of ideas of a group of people or of a movement.

Trumpism, in other words, is what Trump stands for.

What does Trump or Trumpism stands for, then?

Perhaps America First, whatever that means. Or perhaps MAGA, Make America Great Again? Build a border wall between the US and Mexico and have Mexicans pay for it? Allowing white people to kneel on the necks of black people again?

I don’t know.

Fortunately, we’re here to talk about “a side effect of Trumpism”.

That’s the indirect or unintended consequence of Trumpism, “side effect” being the effect or consequence that happens on the SIDE, alongside the main or intended effect.

Side effect is originally a medical term describing what also happens if you take a pill in order to cure a certain disease or illness.

In medicine, side effect is easy to explain and understand. For example, you take a pain killer pill to alleviate a headache. Then afterward, for the next few hours or so you feel like constantly wanting to vomit and throw up. That feeling of nausea, hence, is a side effect.

In our example, tourism is described as a side effect of Trumpism. Similar to the way that nausea is a side effect of a pain killer pill, fewer tourists are coming to the United States to visit because Trump’s America makes them feel nauseated or at any rate unwelcome.

Chinese parents, for example, are certainly hesitating to send their kids to America for study right now. Call it another side effect of Trumpism.

In short, Trumpism is a bitter pill to swallow for many.

Anyways, here are media examples of “side effect” in the figurative sense:

1 One of the lesser-known side effects of the coming Supreme Court ruling on Obamacare: if certain states end up losing health-insurance subsidies, employers in those states will face no penalty for failing to provide coverage.

The case known as King v. Burwell -- which goes before the high court on Wednesday for arguments -- centers around whether the 34 states that use the federal HealthCare.gov health exchange are entitled to subsidies in the form of tax credits if the Affordable Care Act says such aid can be offered for policies purchased through exchanges “established by the State.”

It is those four words that are the bone of contention as petitioners say it excludes any state using the federal HealthCare.gov exchange. Respondents who support the law maintain petitioners aren't reading the passage in context with the entire law.

If the subsidies are wiped out, though, the next domino to fall in those states would be the so-called “employer mandate,” which is a key provision of the law requiring any company with 50 or more full-time employees to offer coverage. If the employer mandate were struck down, it would further undermine the massive health-care initiative that has been the hallmark of President Obama’s term in office.

“The economic underpinnings of this law unravel very quickly” without the state subsidies, says Brian Pinheiro, an attorney with Philadelphia-based Ballard Spahr who specializes in employee-benefits cases.

- One lesser-known, but huge side effect of Obamacare ruling, MarketWatch.com, March 2, 2015.

2 This week the House of Commons will finally get an opportunity to vote on hundreds of Lords amendments to the EU Withdrawal Bill.

Most of the attention has been on amendments to keep the UK in a customs union and to ensure parliament has a meaningful vote on our future relationship with the EU at the end of the negotiations. These are important issues on which Labour has led the way, but less attention has been given to another Labour priority: we are determined to keep the protections of the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights for UK citizens after Brexit.

In order to preserve legal continuity and certainty after we leave the EU, the Withdrawal Bill will translate all EU law into UK law. But while the Prime Minister has repeatedly claimed that her government will not use Brexit to dismantle citizens’ rights and protections, the one component of EU law that her Bill will not transfer across is the Charter of Fundamental Rights.

This is a mistake.

The Charter has three key functions. First, it codifies in one place a clear set of political, social and economic rights that citizens can rely on. This enables us to better understand and more easily defend those rights, collected as they are in one document rather than scattered across thousands of pages of legislation and case law.

Second, it supplements the rights enshrined in the European Convention on Human Rights and the UK’s own Human Rights Act, developing existing protections such as the right to equal treatment and adding new ones. The “right to be forgotten”, for example, allows people to remove historic data relating to them from appearing in search engine results, demonstrating the Charter’s ability to keep our rights up-to-date as times change.

Third, the Charter acts as a key to all other EU law, providing legal certainty for claimants, defendants, and judges alike. Maintaining the Charter in UK law would prevent needless litigation to establish whether rights from before Brexit could be relied on in the UK after it.

...

Since the referendum, Labour has recognised the Charter’s importance and has fought against a Brexit deal that strips away its protections. And on this, Labour is not alone. The House of Lords passed an amendment to keep the Charter last month and earlier this year a joint report by Amnesty International and Liberty decried the government’s “extraordinary step of copying and pasting the entirety of EU law into domestic law, but leaving its key human rights component behind”.

Those organisations also agreed with a legal expert’s independent analysis for the Equality and Human Rights Commission, which concluded that excluding the Charter “will lead to a significant weakening of the current system of human rights protection in the UK”. This is a completely unacceptable side-effect of leaving the EU.

- The unacceptable side effect of Brexit: MPs must save the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights, NewStatesman.com, June 11, 2018.

3 An Alzheimer’s Society investigation reveals the shocking side effect of lockdown on the symptoms of people with dementia.

Involving almost 2,000 respondents affected by dementia, it shows that since being forced to stay isolated and inside their homes, more than four in five (82%) reported a deterioration in people with dementia’s symptoms.

Of those who had seen a decline, around half reported increased memory loss (50%) and difficulty concentrating (48%). More than one in four (27%) said reading and writing has become more difficult, and one in three said the same for speaking and understanding speech (33%). Worryingly, more than a quarter had seen a loss in the ability to do daily tasks, like cooking or dressing (28%).

The coronavirus pandemic has hit people with dementia the hardest, both in terms of deaths from the virus itself, and from a huge increase in ‘unexplained’ non-virus-related deaths, totalling over 13,000 additional deaths between March and June.

The knock-on effect of lockdown is interruptions and suspensions to health and social care services, upended routines, care home visitor restrictions and a prolonged period of social isolation for people with dementia.

The findings confirm what the charity has heard since March through its Dementia Connect support line, with symptom deterioration the second most common reason for calls behind mental health impact. It underlines the vital role of social contact in keeping people with dementia well. Since lockdown began, the charity’s support services have been used more than half a million times, providing a lifeline to thousands of people.

With almost a third (29%) of people with dementia also reporting that the pandemic has had a negative effect on other aspects of their physical health or underlying conditions, the charity fears a further tragic loss of life, especially in the event of a second coronavirus wave over winter.

Lockdown isolation causes shocking levels of decline for people with dementia, Alzheimers.org.uk, July 30, 2020.

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About the author:

Zhang Xin is Trainer at chinadaily.com.cn. He has been with China Daily since 1988, when he graduated from Beijing Foreign Studies University. Write him at: zhangxin@chinadaily.com.cn, or raise a question for potential use in a future column.

（作者：張欣 編輯：yaning）